Duped by the Beast of War

As if living in a never-ending “war-time,” the war drums are once again fast approaching on the horizon. The country I live in, the United States of America, already involved in multiple wars – some overt, others covert – is threatening to attack another sovereign nation, this time Syria. The whole thing is totally insane; our government’s reliance on military solutions is pathological,[1] a form of mental illness.[2] It certainly seems as if our country doesn’t know how to imagine solutions outside the paradigm of war. The fact that we, as a species, are investing our creative genius to conjure up an endless war which is unceasingly draining us of our most precious resources is complete and utter madness. We are truly in the midst of a global collective psychosis of epic proportions, what the Native Americans call “wetiko psychosis.”

War is really an epidemic of madness. Throughout human history, war is the most violent and destructive activity in which we human beings have been engaged. It is an irrational phenomenon that can’t be stopped or controlled with rational arguments, for its source is the shared unconscious of humanity. Author Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, writes, “However and wherever war begins, it persists, it spreads, it propagates itself through time and across space with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech. War spreads and perpetuates itself through a dynamic that often seems independent of human will. It has, and we like to say of things we do not fully understand, ‘a life of its own.’”[3] In war our species has created an out-of-our-control Frankenstein monster that has developed a seemingly autonomous and independent “life of its own.” When I first read Ehrenreich’s words, I immediately thought of “wetiko” (which, simply put, refers to the spirit of evil), which I had written extensively about in my book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. Originating in the psyche,[4] wetiko – a psychospiritual disease of the soul – similarly develops an apparently autonomous and independent life and will of its own. The more I studied Ehrenreich’s work, the more I realized that the beast of war is a virulent incarnation of the wetiko bug writ large on the world stage.

An out-of-control robotic golem, the war machine develops a seeming autonomy that (just like the wetiko virus) generates its own self-sustaining momentum; war is simultaneously its own cause and effect. Seen as a cultural trait, war has evolved in the way that it has simply because it is advantageous to and profits from itself. In a self-perpetuating vicious and violent cycle of infinite regress that is a self-fulfilling feedback loop, the only defense against war is war itself. Thus war metastasizes and spreads, steamrolling all peaceful solutions under its relentless, circular and self-justifying logic. Once the cycle of violence starts and the dogs of war are unleashed, there is simply no stopping nor predicting it. A force of nature unlocked, once the Pandora’s box of war is opened, there is no coaxing the genie back into the bottle. Social scientists, in mathematical studies looking at the outbreaks of wars and national decisions to participate in wars, have shown strong indications of epidemicity, which is to say that war spreads in patterns identical to those of disease outbreaks. War is a living flesh and blood example of how human societies can fall prey to systems of behavior that are entirely of their own creation that can sweep up and devour all who are involved. This is reminiscent of the legendary resurrected tiger which devours the magician who restored it to life out of its skeletal bones. In war we have fallen prey to the power of our own misguided magic.

The first principle of psychological method is that any phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined. No syndrome can be truly dislodged from its cursed condition until we first move imagination into its heart. Due to its traumatizing nature, many of us don’t even know how to think about war. Interestingly, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during much of the Vietnam War, reflecting upon its horrors, writes, “we can now understand these catastrophes for what they were: essentially the products of a failure of imagination.” The same phrase – “failure of imagination” – was used during the Bush Administration as an excuse for why they weren’t prepared for the 9/11 attacks. If war escapes the reach of our imagination, it will dictate, enforce and establish dominion over all of us. First and foremost an act of imagination, war enlists our own imagination to become an agent of negation and destruction. In modern times, the majority of people apparently find the most decisive and captivating manifestations of power to be in that which destroys, rather than that which creates; this is an expression of collective subconscious and un-integrated trauma. The imagination of a people as a whole must be conscripted and reshaped in order to prepare a reluctant citizenry for war. War, and the weapons of collective death that are its accessories, are the products of the greatest creative power operating within the human spirit – the human imagination; and human imagination, it must be added, is capable of getting rid of them. Since our species has invented war, we can also invent and manifest peace. If we can’t imagine this, then what are we thinking? An impaired imagination, unable to even imagine peace, is simultaneously a cause and effect of the proliferation of war. While on one level the war we are involved in uses such things as bombs, the real war is a war on consciousness (see my article “The War on Consciousness”), which is nothing other than a war on the imagination itself. A debilitated imagination fundamentally weakens humanity, making it easier prey to be manipulated by a predatory elite.

Being that the phenomenon of war seems autonomous, I find myself imagining: what if we viewed war as if it is a living entity that did have a life and will of its own? In war, it is as if some transhuman/antihuman monstrosity has insinuated itself into the human scene across multiple generations. This war-mongering entity is an impersonal, diabolical energy that by all evidence seems to have possessed our species to do its bidding, making all of us its “reps.” Our rush to war is a march of folly, as we unconsciously goose-step on the wheel of endless samsaric suffering that we ourselves are creating. As if in the throes of an addiction, we are seemingly entrapped in the beast of war’s iron grip, blindly compelled to become war’s instruments of proliferation. The creature of war feeds into and off of the regressed, animal-like part of ourselves, as if it returns us to the state of consciousness of a pea-brained dinosaur.[5] Psychic epidemics like war can only take place when there is a collective lowering of the state of consciousness, an abaissement du niveau mental.[6] Steeped in the fog of war, we become like zombies, sleepwalkers in a dream, lemmings headed for the sea.

In our interminable and monomaniacal persistence in error, suffering from an endless inability to learn from our mistakes, it certainly seems as if a demonic entity is pulling the strings of our psyche to influence us to act out in ways that are hell-bent on our self-destruction. To quote eminent theologian and 9/11 truth activist David Ray Griffin, “It does seem that we are possessed by some demonic power that is leading us, trancelike, into self-destruction.”[7] Our battle seems less against “flesh and blood” than against some demonic “powers and principalities,” “against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12) to which human civilization is in bondage.

I imagine this malevolent, higher (and lower) dimensional entity feverishly working behind the scenes, manipulatively operating through our unconscious blind spots, sponsoring our shadow projections, inspiring our technological advances to create ever-more-efficient and impersonal killing machines while it fans the flames of our fear, greed and blood lust so as to incite our war fever. And as we wage war on each other, this bellicose entity engorges itself on the smorgasbord of our self-created suffering and destruction, or so I imagine.

This dark entity, what Jung refers to as “the dark God,” has placed previously unimaginable implements of mass destruction into our hands, set to go off at the push of a button, for us to ultimately destroy the biosphere itself, the life support system of the planet. As if performing a sacred “black” mass, the building up of an ever-increasing cache of high-tech weaponry is the preparatory ritual calling forth their inevitable use in a catastrophe that we, as self-entranced, deluded master magicians, are collaboratively conjuring up. To quote Jung, “Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use. It is well known that fire-arms go off of themselves if only enough of them are together.”[8] And yet, it is not too late to shed light on this “devil within” and change our course away from the impending disaster that we ourselves are invoking.

Only something truly alive has the capacity to destroy itself. It is clear we are in the process of destroying ourselves as a species (see Fukashima and the subsequent rush to build more nuclear reactors for another example). As if performing a species-wide eco-suicide ritual en masse, we are taking part, whether we know it or not, in a cosmic anti-sacred ceremony that will leave no one around to experience the end result. Our scientific, technological wizardry has surpassed our wildest dreams. The question is: will our emotional, spiritual and moral qualities continue to lag far behind, and thus doom us to a morbid future of our own making?

One helpful way of framing our situation is as follows: we are destroying ourselves as the way to learn how to not destroy ourselves, which we clearly haven’t yet learned, or we wouldn’t be destroying ourselves. Implicit in this logic is that there is a lesson encoded in the acting out of our insanity that we couldn’t learn any other way. If we don’t recognize what is being revealed to us, as if having a recurring dream – a nightmare – we will simply continue along the path of self-destruction, eventually reaching the point of no return and then finally crossing that Rubicon. On the other hand, if we recognize what is being revealed to us through the acting out of our insanity, we can snap out of our self-induced hypnotic spell and choose to stop killing ourselves – what a radical idea! We can then invest our creativity and resources in building the world we want to live in, or so I imagine. It is important to realize – this is within the realm of the possible, and as such, demands the engagement of our imagination to get on board.

Seen as cells in a greater organism, it is as if our species is suffering from an auto-immune disease of the psyche, having become infected with a cancer of the mind that has turned us against each other so that we are literally attacking and destroying ourselves. Ehrenreich continues, “If war is analogous to a disease, then, it is analogous to a contagious disease…So, to continue the epidemiological metaphor, if war is regarded as an infectious ‘disease,’ it is caused by a particularly hardy sort of microbe─one capable of encysting itself for generations, if necessary, within the human soul.”[9] Interestingly, wetiko is a disease of the soul – “a particularly hardy sort of microbe” – that is contagious, travelling through the vector of our shared unconsciousness. Ehrenreich is approaching the phenomenon of war imaginatively – envisioning it as an infectious, contagious disease, an invisible microbe that replicates itself through multiple generations. Her approach is contagious in its own right, as her imaginative musings can activate, inspire and mobilize our own divinely-inspired creative imagination to re-envision our situation in novel and creatively empowering ways. To elaborate her imaginings, it’s as if an incorporeal, immaterial micro-parasite – a virus of the mind called wetiko – has gotten inside of our brain in such a way that it compels us to act out its nefarious agenda in the outer world. Just like a dream where the inner is the outer, what’s playing out in the world is synchronistically reflecting something taking place within us. Something is being shown to us in the process that is most important for us to know and understand.

War is a prosperity-reducing depopulation ritual, a parasite on human life and culture, draining us of as many things as can be imagined – including life itself. Like a parasite, war kills a significant proportion of the host population, and then, in the resulting gaps between wars, immunity from the parasite seems to be conferred; unfortunately, the gaps between wars have disappeared. We now find ourselves in an endless war, a life and death struggle with a seemingly malevolent entity – wetiko being one of its many names – which we ourselves have conjured up. Ultimately speaking, we are fighting with a dark part of ourselves that we have apparently lost our ability to be in conscious relationship with.

Viewed as an autonomous entity, war is a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that found in both living things as well as within the human mind itself. “Self-replicating patterns of behavior” is the way Jung describes the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Informational fields of influence, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are the very agencies that pattern human perception and give shape and form to both individual and collective human behavior. War is a living archetypal force that exists within the psyche of humanity; collective psychoses like war are always animated by a constellated archetype, oftentimes informed by deeper religious energies. A cosmically driven force, once the archetype of war is activated in the collective psyche, like all archetypes, it potentially drafts us into its gravitational field-of-force. If we remain unconscious of the archetypal elements that drive us, however, we won’t be able to escape from the downward and destructive pull into its sinkhole, at which point we would be fully in the grip of the archetype, compelled like an automaton to act out its script. All archetypes are bipolar, which is to say they have a potentially negative or positive aspect. If we become conscious of the archetypal dimension that is playing out, however, we can mediate, humanize and channel its enormous energy in a constructive, rather than a destructive way.

This self-perpetuating archetypal dynamic is analogous to a self-replicating computer virus or malware that infects a computer and programs it to self-destruct. Like the archetype of war, these computer viruses have no underlying material substance at all, but rather, are “programs” designed to reproduce themselves. Our leaders are themselves just unwitting instruments – patsies – merely playing roles through which this infernal programming can incarnate itself. Looking out for what they conceive of as their own interests, many of them have little or no awareness of the darker, daemonic power that has gripped them and is compelling them to incarnate itself into our world through their agency. America and its military, for example, are being used as an instrument of war to reshape the geopolitical landscape so as to serve the interests of a tiny yet powerful shadowy global cabal which has taken control over significant parts of the U. S. government. Being in the pocket of the cabal, our leaders are its mouthpieces. As if inter-nested iterations of a fractal, the cabal is itself just an intermediary, a pawn doing the bidding of the formless underlying archetype. Once we consciously recognize the deeper archetypal pattern that is in-forming world events, instead of being compelled to unconsciously recreate ever-amplified versions of the archetype in its destructive form, our expansion of consciousness empowers us to channel the archetype in its more life-affirming form. Imagine that!

Just like a transpersonal force can literally take over and possess a person and make them its instrument of incarnation – and revelation – this same process can happen on a collective scale as well; a group of people, nations or an entire species can become seized by a more powerful archetypal energy that compels them to unconsciously, and hence destructively, act it out in the world. In collective events such as wars, we are seeing through a looking glass into the world-soul of humanity as it is being played out on the global stage. Just like a process going on within the unconscious of an individual will compel them to act it out in their life, in the activity of war, a process that is going on within the collective psyche of humanity – which is to say within each one of us in its own unique way – is getting dreamed up en masse into materialization in the world.

War is an inflammation, an outbreak in the world’s body politic reflecting a deeper systemic disease in the underlying psyche of humanity. Jung simply states, “It is the psyche of man that makes wars.”[10] Hidden within the psyche is an incredible power which, as history shows, can transform entire civilizations in unforeseen ways. The future will be decided by changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, which is truly the world’s pivot.

Interestingly, the Book of Revelations talks about a “war in heaven.” The Bible itself can be seen to be a self-revelation of the psyche itself. From this point of view, the events portrayed in the Bible are utterances of the soul, pointing to transcendental realities. The “war in heaven” is symbolically representing a living dynamism that is taking place within the collective unconscious of humanity. If, indeed, “the kingdom of heaven is within us,” so, too, is the “war in heaven.” When we are not able to contain the “warring” within our own self, this conflict of opposites spills out into the outside world, where it gets acted out in the world theater by way of projection. When Jung was asked if the third world war could be avoided, he answered that it depended on how many individuals could reconcile the opposites within themselves.

The specter of war breaking out in the greater body politic haunts the collective unconscious of all of humanity. In modern times, the psychopathic global war on terror[11] is everywhere and affects everyone; it is universally traumatizing and is damaging to the soul of humanity. War isn’t a phenomena that only happens halfway around the globe (in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example), but war is something which takes place within our very soul. Like a demon, the plague of war can invade humanity’s inner world and inspire us to transgress our human limits, carrying us to inconceivable excesses of brutality. Even if our current war is taking place thousands of miles away, just by its mere happening, the act of war creates a “dissociative field” of trauma which affects all of us and forces everyone to (mal)adapt. Dissociation can readily entrench itself in an entire population, disconnecting us from each other, as well as deadening our hearts as it fragments the inner landscapes of our minds. War dehumanizes everyone, as it requires us not only to dehumanize our enemy, but to anesthetize and dehumanize ourselves as well. An intrinsic part of the dissociative field is a force that opposes and actively resists our seeing the deeper implications of what we are doing to ourselves. The collectively shared dissociation, numbing, denial and self-deception become self-perpetuating, as the dissociative field must, of necessity, be continually maintained lest we wake up to the genocidal enterprise we are all participating in. To the extent we are feeding this dissociative field through our own dissociation from and within ourselves, we have all become both victims and victimizers of war, complicit in its proliferation. Appearances to the contrary, there are ultimately no winners in war.

The atrocities that our government is involved in – and we, by proxy, are complicit in – are so horrible that they have to be internally denied. This creates a cognitive dissonance within our minds such that our ability to creatively and responsibly respond is disabled. Many of us simply resist the truth of what’s happening in our world; our looking away reinforces our “need to not know,” which then further feeds our dissociation in a diabolical feedback loop of our own making. Complicit in our own self-hypnosis, our moral eyes become blinded in the process. Interestingly, the self-created entity of wetiko is a form of blindness that not only believes itself to be sighted, but arrogantly imagines itself to be more sighted than anyone else. We are a species who has fallen asleep but imagines we are awake.

An entire culture can prefer blindness; America, based on overwhelming evidence, seems to be a nation which has gone blind. Poet Theodore Roethke famously wrote, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Hopefully, as is evidenced by people’s overwhelming outcry against attacking Syria, more and more of us are seeing through our politicians and mainstream media’s feeble-to-the-point-of-absurd lies and war propaganda purporting that we should attack Syria based on humanitarian pretexts. It would be a true case of “American exceptionalism” and demanding true courage to snap out of our dissociation and deal with the shock of multiple realizations: the lie we’ve been living, the evil we’ve been complicit in, and the reality we’ve been avoiding.

Jung writes, “We are threatened with universal genocide, if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death.”[12] Snapping out of our dissociation and seeing through our illusions is to be “dis-illusioned,” which is a truly shattering experience, and is a symbolic death of the self that was wed to illusion. This is to realize how we have been colluding in our own demise, which snaps us out of the spell of being a helpless victim and connects us with our true power and responsibility. In addition, instead of creating universal genocide which involves the death of our bodies, a symbolic death involves the death of the imagination that we are just a body. In other words, the “symbolic death” which Jung is referring to involves seeing through the primordial illusion – our sense of ego – of being an isolated entity separate from other isolated entities. This involves recognizing – as if going through a rebirth – that we are interdependent parts of a greater organism that we all share in called life. When we realize this it becomes inconceivable – impossible to imagine – that we would wage war on each other.

The fact that throughout our lifetime there has not been a moment free of one group waging war on another makes war seem normalized, as if it is just the way things are, part of being human. This thought-form is a lie, inspired and fed by the very same energy that animates war itself. If we buy into our feelings of helplessness and believe that we can’t do anything about war, we are then its unwitting accomplices. In actuality we are magicians, powerful beyond measure, having unconsciously misused our own power to bewitch ourselves, having fallen under a curse of our own making. Our task is to break out of our self-induced spell. Holding this possibility in mind, Jung wonders whether “humanity…may yet evolve a different ideal. In time even conquest will cease to be the dream.”[13] What will happen, I find myself imagining, as more and more of us, not just ordinary citizens – but actual soldiers in our illegal wars of aggression, as well as the military commanders, generals, senators, presidents and prime ministers, heads of corporations – wake up to how we have been hoodwinked, bamboozled – duped – by the creative genius of our own minds into seeing war as a legitimate means of operating in the world? Ah, what then?

[1] A distinction needs to be made: I am not talking about wars in which one country rightfully defends itself from outright aggression from another (an example would be the Allies fighting Nazi Germany in World War II). The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and (possibly) Syria do not fit this category.

[2] From the ruling elite’s point of view, they are just trying to accomplish hegemonic geopolitical objectives and are willing to sacrifice as many innocent people as necessary in order to accomplish their morally depraved goal. Their moral deficiency in having no compunction in doing so is where the mental illness lies.

[3] Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, p. 132.

[4] Like Jung, I am using the word psyche in an all-inclusive sense, meaning the totality of all psychic processes, both conscious and unconscious. Not reducible to biochemical processes in the brain, it is a mysterious “substanceless substance” that exists between spirit and matter.

[5] In addition to the regressed, pathological state that I am pointing at, war can also bring out in its participants incredibly heroic, spiritual qualities.

[6] French psychologist Pierre Janet’s term, literally translating as “reduction of mental level.” It involves a weakening of the restraints and inhibitions of the ego.

[11] The phrase “Global War on Terror” is a contradiction in terms – War is terror, so can how can terror ever be fought and eliminated by war? The very words “war on terror” induces a cognitive dissonance in the collective psyche. The fact is that such a war is not intended to ever end, thus serving the insatiable greed of the evil interests who continuously profit from war.

6 Responses to Duped by the Beast of War

I’ll suggest that what Arjuna did at the behest of Krisna truly was from higher consciousness, but in this world that’s the exception to the rule. In that case, the ones that Arjuna killed were falling into deeper and deeper evil. That would be something that Krishna understood from the start, though it took Arjuna a while to catch on. So, from this perspective, their destruction by Arjuna was a blessing rather than a curse, because rather than fall deeper and deeper into evil, with the possibility in the end of being dissolved as human consciousnesses, they had a better opportunity to come to terms with the evil they were manifesting and the opportunity to reincarnate with better opportunities in the future. I relate to Paul’s impressions, as I have a similar outlook. I have a great deal of intuitive synchronicity that relates to physics and metaphysics. It started when I was 18, in 1970. At the time, I was a student at Waynesburg College in Pennsylvania, majoring in mathematics. Previous to that, as an adolescent and teenager, I had read all I could find about Edgar Cayce, by Lobsang Rompa and about reincarnation, time travel, parallel universes, out of body travel, ancient civilizations and books by Jane Roberts and Erich von Daniken, etc. I presume it helped stimulate the intuitive synchronicity, that I began to notice when I was 18. On the metaphysical side, home from college for Thaksgiving vacation, I took a book from my mother’s bookcase, The Iron Mistress, and read it straight through. It was about an historical figure who died at the battle of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, on March 6, 1836. “Coincidentally”, my younger brother’s birthday, just happens to be March 7. Many years later, when I visited the Alamo, I found a picture postcard of a participant of the battle, named Bonham, that reminded me of my younger brother. Recently, I’ve begun to take seriously the idea that my older brother might also be connected to one of the participants, Buck Travis. It just so happens that Buck Travis and James Bowie were almost ready to kill each other, even though they were on the same side. But they managed to settle their differences and fight the battle together. I had a similar relationship with my older brother, who retired from the Navy as a Master Chief, at age 60, a few years ago(I was in the Marine Corps myself,1972-1974). Our relationship got off to a good start this lifetime, when he was 5 and I was 3. He came down the stairs toward me with a big bladed knife, like a Bowie knife. He tried to stab me with it, but I held his knife hand with my hands so he couldn’t, feeling sorrowful that I might die and contemplating how bad everyone would feel about it. But hearing all the commotion, my mother came down the stairs, took the knife away from him and showed me that it was only a rubber knife. Evidently, karma dictated that I should come to feel what it’s like, when someone’s about to kill you with a knife. For several years after that, my older brother and I would fight a lot. The pattern was that he would say things to make me angry and I would fight him. But when he was a freshman in high school, and I an eigth grader, it happened one last time. He said something to make me angry and the next thing I knew, I had him down and was beginning to bounce his head off the curb a few times. But I didn’t really want to hurt him, so I stopped. I knew I would never fight him again. He stopped saying bad things about me. The negative patterni was finished. The next year in high school, we even studied together for an important Biology exam, a subject he flunked the year before. Recently, in talking to my younger brother, his memories of the two of us fighting all the time, had given him fears that we might kill each other. Over the years since then, much more intuitive synchronicity has occurred, seemingly revealing significant reincarnational patterns of myself and others. On the physics side of things in 1970, I had a physics course, with a physics lab. In physics lab, we were using oscilloscopes to observe electromagnetic energies, in the form of green ,wavy, 2-dimensional sine waves. But I noticed that the sine waves were more distinct and less distinct at regular intervals. That told me immediately that the green lines were actually depicting three dimensional spirals. Extrapolating from there, one can easily come to a more correct understanding of what the actual structure of atomic energies, electromagnetic energies and other energies must be. One can easily imagine what a time stream is, the reality of parallel universes and how time travel would be possible(both mental and physical). Then why does Maxwell’s theory depict electromagnetic energies, as 2-dimensional sine waves( not necessarily Maxwell’s idea), why is atomic energy described erroneously, as little round things and why has the understanding of space as a ether been obfuscated in physics? It seems like deliberate obfuscation to me. Someone doesn’t want us to know. And yet, the ancient Egyptians believed in Nuit, infinite living space, source of all. I mentioned that I understand reincarnational patterns. I also understand them as they relate to war. Several years ago I had a friend, on a spiritual path, who revealed to me a couple of visions he had. In one vision, he was the general of an army, who gave the order to slaughter an entire city, after defeating it in war. I asked him why he did that. He said it was so that the enemy could never mount a counter attack on his homeland. In his other vision my friend remembered being ambushed and slaughtered. From all that and the kind of person he was, I realized his connection to Agamemnon, who was my deadly enemy during the Trojan War, when I was a Trojan warrior. I also realized that his wife reminded me of Cassandra and that his younger brother reminded me of Menelaus. The Trojan War is particularly significant in that it contains the two main motives for war, that are entwined in the negative, repetitive, karmic patterns, manifesting on this planet. My friend had a certain lack of tolerance, in my view. He angrily left a spiritual group he was involved with, taking his friends and family with him. I don’t know how well my friend understood his connection to Agamemnon, but I had mentioned it to his younger brother. My friend died recently of cancer and since my karma is tied to his, I wonder if I too will die of cancer someday. I may write a science fiction book someday, about reincarnational patterns, as they pertain to war, amongst other things. Consider this scenario. A few tens of thousands of years ago, an extraterrestrial race, came to this planet on a rescue mission. Their man God and mother Goddess were warned not to interbreed with the local Earthlings. Their energetic vibration was at a higher level than the local Earthlings, whom they hoped to gradually raise to a higher level of evolution, like their own. But the Luciferians, already largely in control on this planet, spread the lie worldwide, that it would be beneficial to interbreed with the newcomers. As a consequence, the mother Goddess of the new race was seduced and impregnated by an enterprising Earthling. Immediately, that lowered the vibrational level of the new race. When they found out the reason why, they dropped into anger, hostility and lack of tolerance toward the man who had impregnated their mother Goddess. They went to his village and confronted him. Finding that his former friends were extremely angry at him, in grief, he turned away from his former friend, so his former friend could kill him if he wanted to. His former friend takes his head with the jawbone of an animal, or something. Then his former friend gives the order to kill everyone in the village, except those they decide to keep as sexual slaves. The dead man is nonetheless very alive in etheric form. Standing there in etheric form, observing the actions of his former friends, the dead man rises into intense anger and decides that in the future(future lifetimes), he will absolutely fight them to the death in similar situations and have relations with their women, as he pleases. Thus begin many repetitive patterns of war, tens of thousands of years before the Trojan War. The man killed reincarnates in 9 months as the mother Goddess’ son. In the future he will become involved with too many Helens, Delilahs, Cleopatras, etc. and will live too often like Alciabades. The man’s former friend will live too many lives as a tyrant, with a repetitive pattern of destroying entire cities. And consider this last bit of trivia. Cain and Abel may have been half brothers, with the same biological mother, but different biological fathers, whereas Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln may have been half brothers with the same biological fathers, but different biological mothers. That last bit I found on the Internet.

I have been talking about a virus. I like your language better. The use of the image regarding “Imagination” brought me to a memory of my father speaking in the same terms. Thank you for this. You have given me a boost up in my language skills. Much appreciated. Namaste – Marina

I think that the dynamic that you talked about in Wetiko is important and a brilliant insight. When I came back into the US from Mexico and Central America, I thought, “You Americans are all on the verge of mental collapse. Try to relax a bit.” Of course, I am as American as anyone else, so I am also co-creating this mess of our culture. The war dynamic is very much like kids getting into a fight. They don’t understand why they do it, everyone is less happy afterwards, and the pain endures, but they are still drawn to it until they evolve out of it. Will we evolve out of war as a culture?
John S

Love your writings Paul. We’re all here for a reason. I believe you’ve found yours and believe me that’s a blessing especially in our day and age. Keep up the good work. We need the wisdom, knowledge and guidance.

As to John above. You sound a bit younger than I am. What you’re describing is exactly what I went through after Vietnam. I takes awhile but believe it or not it gets better and you will find yourself back in these conversations if for no other reason than you will have some answers to their questions or thoughts. Many things are not OK but more situational. We make a decision and right or wrong the deed is done so we have to live with it and take it from there. Forgiveness is a wonderful thing and it also goes for ourselves. But some will never understand. Just like Leonard Cohen’s song. “When they said repent, repent I wonder what they meant.”

I’ve been reading No Easy Way, about the Seals and their killing of Osama Bin Laden. On the one hand, i am in awe of their mental and physical prowess. They are truly in a class all their own. I grew up going to military schools, so i can relate.

The author, who uses a fake name to protect himself and his comrades, talks about how they relate to each other, and it’s all about humiliation. They constantly make fun of each other, and pull pranks that for most of us would end a relationship rather than encourage it. I remember how hard it was for me to relate at this level. It never made sense to me.

Is there anyone that can explain to me the story of Arjuna and Krishna in the Mahabarata? For the life of me i’ve never understood the notion that it was okay for Arjuna to kill and maim the foe, because that was his duty as a warrior. How does that play out with our soldiers? The Seals love to do battle; they thrive on it. They find it hard to go home to their families, because they miss the intensity, and brotherhood, and drama, of war.

Now that wars are contracted out, there’s less participation by the citizens. Most of us only know about “the war” when we read the papers or watch TV. Historically, wars tended to skip a generation or two because people saw how terrible the results were. But we tend to forget the past, and so another war would show up as soon as the kids had no idea what they were getting in to.

Part of my dealing with my own projections is to not participate in the conversation. While I get massively upset and reactive, meanwhile the Keystone XL pipeline and other heinous bills are being passed behind our backs. In my own life, I’m participating more and more in whole hearted conversations, deepening my relations, and in awe of how some of us are learning how to be vulnerable in public.

So from that perspective, the spectrum of possibilities is widening. It is said that “you can’t have one without the other”.